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Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.

You may remember that I had a Sega Master System growing up. Well, that wasn't my only way to play games back then. We also had a family computer, and Dad would install computer games on it to keep us entertained. They were always free games - Dad hated spending money. He wouldn't buy gas, the car would move by itself to try and earn Dad's nod of approval.

The 8-Bit Book - 1981 to 199x completes the 8-bit home computer trilogy of the acclaimed Golden Years series, covering over two hundred of the most influential, inspiring and downright interesting computer games of the 8-bit era.

The pages on www.OldGames.sk serve as a source of information regarding the history of computer games, primarily for the PC platform with MS-DOS operating system. It naturally also offers download of these games, so old-timers may nostalgically recall the times long gone, and the young players can try how the games were played back then. The history of computer games is also inextricably linked to magazines, and this site will provide you with the possibility of browsing the gaming magazines from the early 90s Czech Republic and Slovakia, like BiT, Excalibur, Score, Riki, and perhaps more in time.

The vintage Commodore 64 personal computer is getting a makeover, with a new design and some of the latest computing technologies, as the brand gets primed for a comeback.

The Atari 5200 is, dare I say it, Atari's answer to Intellivision, Colecovision and the Astrocade. Why a new game system when Atari already had the 400 and 800 computer systems with far more power, memory, picture resolution and overall capability than any dedicated game unit? Well, reasoned the powers that be at Atari, "the game playing world just isn't ready for a real computer."

If you lived during the 80's you probably know that the Commodore 64 was a popular computer/video game console that dominated the market, outselling IBM clones, Apple, and Atari--yes, Atari at one time made computers. The vast majority of Commodore 64s have since gone the way of all old technology and are collecting dust in basements, adorning landfills, or sitting next to that Betamax video recorder in the homes of those who say, "I'm not buying something new until they improve on what I already have."

The vintage Commodore 64 personal computer is getting a makeover, with a new design and some of the latest computing technologies, as the brand gets primed for a comeback.

The Commodore 64 (C64) is perhaps the best known 8-bit computing platform ever designed, rivaled only by the Apple II in terms of popularity and longevity. Within a few short years after its introduction in 1982, the Commodore 64 dominated the low-end computer market, receiving a steady stream of software and peripheral support that lasted through the decade.

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While horror might be a mainstay for console games today, there was a time when a home video game system didn't have enough power to run the terrifying graphics needed to create a rich and frightening universe. So the place where the spooky classics went to get their fright on was on computers. From PC, Mac and even a few 8-bit models, the place to experience real terror was on the hard drive. The games that follow are the best and most groundbreaking fright-fest video games ever released. Just keep repeating to yourself, "it's only DOS", "it's only DOS".

The concluding part of my Top 100 Computer / Video Games of All Time! At last it's over!

I have been playing video games on my personal computer for at least twelve years, and in that time I have probably played hundreds of titles. Some games were fascinating at first, but quickly lost their appeal. Others, however, can stand the test of time, and are clearly true classics in the genre that I still have fun playing, many years after they were first published. As such, I write this article as my homage to retro-gaming - the ten best old PC games I have ever played.

The first time I ever heard of the PC Engine was when a friend whose Chinese mate's uncle had imported one told me about it. Without having seen it, I just assumed it was some kind of Japanese computer for word processing's sake - not a console the size of a good sarnie, and certainly not one that ran cutting-edge games stored on credit cards. Any which way you sliced it, the PC Engine was something special. From five-player games and the eight-way d-pad sported by its controller to what was at the time easily the best console version of R-Type, NEC's machine was a little marvel. Shame, then, that hardly anybody in the UK had one (though, for some reason, everyone in France did).

It's great that various web site authors and contributors have written reviews of old arcade games, but it's a completely different thing to read reviews that were written when the games were brand new and the hype was on. Here you can find scanned arcade reviews from various popular European home computer magazines. If you wish to contribute by either sending me scans or magazines themselves, please contact me!

Most people probably grew up with console games; depending on your age, anywhere from the Nintendo 64 all the way back to the Atari 2600 and before. But some of us also started out in the pre-Windows world of PC gaming: a land of conventional memory, ZMODEM downloads, IRQ conflicts, and other things we don't miss. But we do miss the games, because when consoles were still maturing, the PC platform had some of the best and most entertaining games ever written. And for those of you who never played games in the pre-3D world: yes, DOS also stands for Disk Operating System. Yes, it's that thing you get when you type "cmd" into the Run bar, and yes, the whole computer used to look like that. Can you believe it?

It's almost 25 years to the day since the ZX Spectrum home computer captured our hearts and relinquished us of any social life back in 1982.

CPC Game Reviews is a website which, as its name suggests, contains reviews of games for the Amstrad CPC computer - hundreds of them, in fact. It also contains a collection of advertisements which have been scanned from Amstrad CPC magazines.

The future of videogames looked bleak. The catastrophic crash of 1984 had wiped out or severely weakened all the major home videogame companies, and home computers were becoming more and more popular. It seemed as if the home videogame system would become a thing of the past.

Magnavox started the video game revolution in 1972 with the release of the Odyssey, the world's first home video game system. For the next five years, the company released a number of standalone consoles in the Odyssey line, giving them numerical suffixes like Odyssey 100, Odyssey 400, and so on. Finally, in 1977, Magnavox signaled a new generation of Odyssey by announcing the Odyssey², a dedicated unit that was to contain 24 games and accommodate four simultaneous players. However, the bottom was quickly dropping out of the over-saturated dedicated console market, and Magnavox scrapped the 24-game Odyssey² in favor of an expandable cartridge-based model. The company released it in 1978, touting it as "The Ultimate Computer Video Game System."